With the inevitable abandonment of the professional market by Apple lots of people are switching to windows. And more often than not either building their own workstations or at least picking the components and getting someone to build one for them.

A couple of questions keep coming up in the forums, so i thought i’d write a short article about the main questions.

Desktops

What processor?

Firstly, its Intel. AMD stepped out of the professional arena a while back, and generally deal in low end to mid range markets. [AMD seem to have re-entered the market with the Ryzen series of CPU’s, so check out the benchmarks and reviews, April 2017] So there are 2 main factors to consider when picking a CPU. You have processors with lots of cores, but lower core clock speed. For example the i7 5820K wich has 6 cores, but runs at 3.4ghz and then you have the i7 6700k which has only 4 cores but runs at 4ghz. Generally it seems to make sense to go for 6x 3.4ghz, rather than 4x 4ghz. But that is only true if what you need the power for is multi-threaded. And unfortunately lots of stuff still isn’t multi threaded and runs on only one core. For example the viewport in cinema4d, Xpresso, character rigs, and most of the realtime stuff you see runs on one single CPU core, so you will get a more responsive viewport while working with a 6700K, but your renders will go slower ( assuming you are rendering with a CPU based renderer, more on that next).

Regarding Xeons. They only really make sense if you are going the Dual cpu route. But the previous issue with clock speeds is still in play. check the single core benchmarks and compare. The xeons usually score significantly less on those.

Check //cbscores.com for how CPU’s score in both single and multi core. Also make sure when googling for cpu scored, that you are looking at cinebench R15 results, not R11.5 ones. They don’t match up.

And Just a final note to make this all more confusing. Not all Ghz are created the same. If you check cb scores, you might notice that a 6700k scores more than a 4770k even though it has a lower clock speed. Thats because its a newer generation and its more efficient. So a 5 year old CPU at 3.2 ghz won’t necessarily match a 3.2ghz cpu from this year.

What Video card (GPU)

Nvidia. Not because its faster, but because all these awesome GPU renders that are out run on CUDA, and thats an Nvidia technology. I’ll be writing an article on them later.

You want to go for the GTX series. Quadro cards have no real benefit in Cinema4D or the GPU renderers. ( maya apparently benefits from Quadro cards).

I think rendering is moving mostly towards the GPU. So i’d buy a motherboard with at least 3 pci-x slots. and fill them up as your budget allows. As of the time writing this article. The 980Ti (6gb) is probably the best choice for GPU rendering. The Titan X is great too, since it gives you 12gb of memory. And when rendering with a GPU renderer you want as much ram as possible, because you cant use your system ram. Or in the cases where you can use it, is slows down significantly. But honestly its rare that scenes are that large.

Hard Drives

I’ll admit, im still on good old fashion spinning hard drives. My laptop came with some SSD’s and while its great to boot things up really quickly, while working, all your applications are going to be in your ram, so i don’t notice that much of a difference.

If you do lots of work where you are dealing with lots of files. image sequences, Cache files for simulations. Than definitely get an SSD, or three. Check Toms hardware for the latest and greatest ( google it, its a hardware review site).

RAM

Just get 16GB for now, but make sure your motherboard supports at least 32GB. Careful don’t cheap out and get the slowest ram, that noticably lags your workflow. But also don’t go overboard and buy the fastest, because without overclocking you’re not going to feel the difference. Check what your processor supports without overclocking.

Also i notice some people think more ram will make your system faster. This is true to some extent, but its not like adding more ram will make your existing system faster. Think of ram like waiters at a restaurant. If you don’t have enough of them you REALLY need more, otherwise everything grinds to a halt. But once you have enough, adding more won’t help. They will just sit there with nothing to do. Ram is similar. If you don’t have enough it’s going to slow you down a lot because, you computer will have to swap files in and out of ram from your hard drive. But if you have 16gb, and don’t use the whole capacity adding more wont have any effect.

Overclocking

I personally don’t overclock, but if you want to tinker with stuff its a viable choice, often making up for the shortcomings of multi-core processors. But keep in mind that it may void your warranty. Do a lot of reading about before just pushing at numbers. 🙂

Case and PSU

If you are building your own system yourself, don’t skimp on the case, make sure it has screwless everything, will make the whole build a much more pleasurable activity. Youtube reviews of cases are a good place to start with when picking a case.

The size of the powersupply you will need depends on the components you are using, once again google is your friend here. spend a bit extra and get a name brand one, like a corsair ( and not the cheapest one). It’ll run quieter and probably last longer. Also less chance of it getting hit by a surge and frying the rest of your system. Never happened to me, i used to use cheapest PSU’s i could get and lots of them died, but no permanent damage. But the volume is a noticeable difference.

My build

I chose the higher clock speed, and got myself and 4790k with a gtx 970, the 980ti and the titanX wern’t out back then. I was planning on building another machine to act as a render slave, with a multi core processor, but in the end i just ended up using render farms when i need to render lots of stuff. It just works better for me. Renders come back waaay faster, and i don’t have to maintain another computer.

Looking for builds? I approve these 🙂

Laptops

Right now, you want to look the MaxQ laptops, they have Nvidia 10 series video cards and perform like champs. The best way to compare then is check their benchmark points. Cinebench for CPU and Octane Bench for GPU. I would suggest getting atleast a 1060 in there, but a 1050ti is not terrible either. It’s about on par with a gtx 970 in benchmarks, which i use and depending on your workload may be enough.

I personally got the MSI GS60 with a GTX970M with 6gb of memory on it. It seemed to be a good balance of price/performance for me. I personally dont really care about battery life. If im doing work i’ll find an outlet, for everything else i have tablets and phones.

The thing that bummed me out most, was the lack of a windows key on the left side of the keyboard.

And finally always remember to do your research, google benchmarks, check forums for feedback on products. Do your homework, things change quickly. Even people who work at computer shops often cant keep up. For example, my 4790k when i bought it, turns out in the combination of the motherboard i bought it was automatically overclocking and then throttling due to heat, had to install new firmware on the motherboard, and then use intel extreme tuning utility to force to just go at stock… And all because i bought the newest thing that was out. Could’ve just went for the 4770k which was tried and true, and only a slight bit slower.

Thanks a lot for your article. This is the kind of information I needed right now. I’m starting to look into building my workstation (or get someone to do it for me), as the only “pro” choice in the Apple world is the uber-expensive Mac Pro, and apparently many people are switching to PC lately.

Glad it helped. There are plenty of videos online about how to build your own pc. Its about the same difficulty level as a complex lego set. just make sure to not cheap out on the case, because a good case with screwless design makes everything much easier.

Or just find a small local PC shop, Im sure they’ll enjoy building it for you as most of their orders are lower end stuff.

Thanks for the article! I think I might get fast i7 for single core application like sketchup. but I do many cpu cores for rendering. but you mentioned render farms. what render farms do you use? Thanks!

it depends on the work you do. As i said, if you are only using octane, then just get the i7. whats the point of the dual cpu? if you really need cpu power, just send it to a farm with the money you save 🙂

don’t get seagate HDD. they terrible. Hitachi apparantly make the most reliable ones. ( google back blaze, drive reliability).

now that it’s 2017,, i was wondering if any of the specs above are now out of date?
as i got to your very informative page from the link you put on the post i did on the x-particle forum a while ago,, when i was stuggling with some features with my mac pro tower/bin
//www.x-particles.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1297&p=7290#p7290

anyway i’m finally going to be making the jump to a PC workstation,, so please me know if so specs are to be updated from the above
i’m mainly be using C4D & adobe stuff,,, & most definitely planning to start using more x-particle fluids & TFD & finally Octane renderer,,, & also want to delve more in VR.

Well the concepts carry on, but obviously there is the gtx titan now, and the gtx 1080. And the strongest single core cpu is the 7700k instead of the 6700k. But you should always look up the cinebench scores of cpus. and gpu benchmarks for the video card you chose. Im not 100% sure, but i think octane is still not fully optimized for the 10 series gtx cards, so they perform only slightly better than the 9 series.

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[…] Thea is a hybrid GPU and CPU renderer with plugins for a bunch of applications. I use cinema4D so that’s the awesomeness im going to cover here. The GPU part (the super fast part) is CUDA based, so you will need an Nvidia card. so if you have a new mac pro, this isn’t going to be super useful to you. Read my hardware building article here //ace5studios.com/hardware […]

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